Exascale Computing

Articles (8)

A monolithic AI supercomputer cabinet backlit by Union Jack light beams, illustrating the UK's sovereign-compute push at London Tech Week 2026
AIanalysis

Britain's Sovereign-Compute Day: A £2bn AMD Bet Meets a £1.1bn State Plan

Britain is funding homegrown silicon for machines that, for now, run on an American vendor's chips. Whether that buys sovereignty or quietly rebrands dependence is the question the spending leaves open.

AI InfrastructureExascale Computing
SCN Staff·
Long, dimly lit data center corridor with rows of black server cabinets, overhead cable trays, and cooling pipes receding to a vanishing point.
HPCnews

NIST's New HPC Security Overlay Turns Compliance Into a Throughput Problem

The final SP 800-234 overlay covers the 287 controls in the SP 800-53B Moderate baseline, adds AC-10 for concurrent interactive sessions, and tailors 60 controls across the access, management, computing, and storage zones defined in SP 800-223.

Exascale ComputingNational Labs & Government
SCN Staff·
Interior of a Japanese supercomputing facility with open server rack showing GPU accelerators alongside a Fujitsu CPU module, representing FugakuNEXT's hybrid architecture pairing MONAKA-X CPUs with NVIDIA GPUs over NVLink Fusion.
HPCanalysis

Japan's Next Flagship Machine Abandons the Top500 Chase

FugakuNEXT pairs Fujitsu MONAKA-X CPUs with NVIDIA GPUs, ending Japan's all-Arm sovereign architecture and betting on throughput over benchmarks.

Exascale ComputingTop500
SCN Staff·
Network flows converging at a switch node, with orderly blue streams on the inbound side becoming chaotic amber tangles on the outbound, visualizing the Incast congestion pattern where InfiniBand collapsed while Slingshot maintained performance.
HPCanalysis

Slingshot Held Performance Under AI Traffic Patterns That Collapsed InfiniBand by 5x on Production Exascale

ISC 2026 research on LUMI, Leonardo, CRESCO8: Slingshot held performance; InfiniBand collapsed 5x under Incast, the AI gradient-sync traffic pattern.

AI InfrastructureData Center Infrastructure
SCN Staff·
A row of HPE Cray cabinets at Argonne's ALCF spelling "Aurora" in large white letters across teal, green, and magenta panels.
HPCnews

Argonne Turns a Plain-English Prompt Into 11,182 GCMC Runs on Aurora

A planner/executor agent hierarchy drove a 5,591-MOF screening campaign across 256 Aurora nodes. Orchestration overhead came in under 90 seconds per run.

Exascale ComputingNational Labs & Government
SCN Staff·
The shadow TOP500
HPCnews

The shadow TOP500: private AI superclusters are redefining supercomputing

xAI's Cortex 2, Meta's mega-clusters, and the $100B NVIDIA-OpenAI deal represent computing installations that dwarf anything on the official rankings. The supercomputing world hasn't reckoned with what that means.

Exascale ComputingHyperscaler Strategy
SCN Staff·
ORNL's Next-Generation Data Center Institute
HPCanalysis

ORNL's Next-Generation Data Center Institute: National Lab Expertise Meets the AI Buildout

The people who built Frontier - the world's first exascale supercomputer - are now designing the next generation of AI data centers. The hyperscalers should be paying attention.

National Labs & GovernmentExascale Computing
SCN Staff·
NSF's $457M Horizon Supercomputer Is Going to Morehouse College
HPCnews

NSF's $457M Horizon Supercomputer Is Going to Morehouse College

The Leadership-Class Computing Facility's first new site selection in a generation lands at an HBCU. The workforce implications matter as much as the FLOPS.

Exascale ComputingNational Labs & Government
SCN Staff·